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Nowadays, one of the major components of many teacher evaluations – including mine – is student engagement. Especially as a new teacher, I struggled with what felt like a game of “Whack-A-Mole” – getting student A on task only to find student B across the room is flinging paper at the student in the next seat. It was a never-ending cycle that left me exhausted. No matter what I did, I couldn’t figure out a way to get every student on task, doing what I needed them (and what they needed) to be doing.

It took me a while to figure out that there were two major reasons why my students weren’t always on task. And no, it wasn’t that my lessons themselves weren’t “engaging,” although, as a new teacher, that actually was part of it, but not the central part. I know this to be true because as I progressed in my teaching career, I learned how to make much more engaging lessons, but unless I employed the tactics I’m about to explain, I wound up with the same problems.

The two reasons my students weren’t always on task were

1) they didn’t know what to do/didn’t have something to do

and

2) they couldn’t do what they were supposed to be doing.

Many of my students were off task because they didn’t know what to or have something to do. I had way too much downtime in my lessons. The students who were mature were able to sit and wait until the next component – which, admittedly, wasn’t long. It wasn’t like I had 5 or 10 minutes of dead time, but any teacher can tell you that even just 10 seconds of space is enough to derail a student who is either immature or not self-directed.

So, what’s a girl to do? I abhorred the idea of busy work – I still do. Whatever I had for my students to do, it had to be authentic and worthwhile. It was a long time ago, so I don’t remember the flash of lightning that hit me for the inspiration, but at some point, I decided to try PowerPoint lessons. I put together all the vocabulary, notes, examples, and practice problems for a concept into a slide show and required my students to take these notes for a grade.

Do you know what it’s like to hear the angels of heaven sing?

I suppose it sounds like different things to different people, but that day it was the sound of silence. It was my whole class on task. Seriously. Every single student. And I know that most teachers will confirm that novelty and/or gimmicks may solve a problem in the short term, but give it about two weeks and things often go back to the way they were.

That didn’t happen. I used PowerPoints with the same success regarding engagement and on-task behavior throughout the rest of not that year, but subsequent years. This is because PowerPoints give students clear and consistent expectations of what they are supposed to be doing, and provides enough information on each slide to keep students engaged if they finish one definition or problem before other students.

The other reason my students were off task was because I was expecting them to do things they couldn’t. Many of my students – like so many in our country – were performing below grade level. When I was putting up one problem at a time and asking students to work on it, the ones who couldn’t do it were off task. Once I changed to PowerPoint lessons, though, this problem was eliminated. Instead of one or two problems at a time, I was able to have several – sometimes up to ten different problems on a slide! I was able to have different levels of problems so that everyone was able to do what I wanted them to do. Additionally, the other slides alleviated this problem because everyone can write down information from a slide. This may not seem worthwhile, but I made sure my students knew two important things about this: 1) this was building notetaking skills, where were vital for their future in education, and 2) these notes were graded, so even if they didn’t fully understand the lesson, just by writing down the information on the slides, they could earn a grade that would help them overall.

And guess what? This all had an unexpected side effect: because these low-performing students now knew what they had to do/had something to do AND could do it, they actually began to improve their understanding and comprehension.

If you’ve never tried using a PowerPoint in your middle school math classroom but you’d like to, I’d encourage you to check out some ready-made lessons that are Common Core-aligned. These are my most popular and best-selling lessons:

Have you ever seen the show Naked and Afraid? Two people are dropped in the wilderness with only one item – like a knife or something – something they chose. They have to survive and get to an “extraction” point. And then they get rescued. So, it’s kind of like your first year teaching. Except there isn’t a rescue. There’s just summer break. So from Discovery Channel, who brought you Deadliest Catch (also easily paralleled to teaching), here is an amazing website with all sorts of cool, free teaching resources!

There are great activities, worksheets (can you say, “sub plans”????), and other things that make this site worth exploring. The lesson plans section is okay, but with the majority of school districts using specific curriculums, they may not be super useful. The exception to this would be homeschooling families. There are definitely great resources for homeschoolers! Also, I don’t have much experience teaching Science or Social Studies (especially at a high school level), so the lesson plans for those subjects may be useful. If for nothing else, the lesson plans on the site could be useful for remediation and/or extension.

One thing that I think is really cool is that because you can search by subject and resource type, you can find resources for a particular topic/concept/skill at various levels. For example, there are ELA worksheets that would be perfect for ESL students for acquiring vocabulary or vocabulary practice. And just to reiterate, these worksheets would be GREAT for sub plans!

I hope this website becomes a great resource for you! Be sure to share with other teachers! And if you like this sort of post and resource, click on the link on the side menu to “like” my Facebook page, where I post links to resources like this Discovery site several times a day.

Also, the Ohio State Buckeyes trounced the Kent State Golden Flashes on Saturday (66-0…woot!). As a reward for their effort, you will be privy to my newest Football Freebie! Be on the lookout tomorrow for the post!